I was ten years old when Israel’s then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated on 4 November 1995, at the end of a rally in Tel Aviv. I remember my parents crying together with my grandparents, who had just returned from the rally in support of the peace process. Rabin was murdered by a Jewish extremist who opposed his attempts to make peace with the Palestinians. Only a month earlier, Benjamin Netanyahu, then-leader of the opposition, had stood on the infamous balcony overlooking Zion Square in Jerusalem, at one of the most vicious and inflammatory demonstrations against Rabin, where chants of “Rabin is a traitor” and “Death to Rabin” were heard, and images of him in an SS uniform circulated.
Netanyahu himself warned that Rabin was endangering Israel’s security and challenged the legitimacy of his government, partly because it relied on the support of Arab parties, which, he claimed, were hostile to the fundamental goals of the Jewish state. Yet it was precisely the support of those Arab parties that allowed Rabin to continue advancing the peace process. Less than seven months after Rabin’s assassination, Netanyahu was elected prime minister for the first time. Since then, he has held the office for around 19 years in total. Three decades after the assassination, Israel remains trapped in a reality of violence, fear, incitement, and deep internal divisions, with the same political discourse in which the very participation of its Arab citizens in the democratic process is repeatedly presented as a threat.
Two days before Israel’s elections, I wrote in Hindustan Times about hope. Hope that the Arab parties would determine the outcome of the elections. That Arab citizens, who make up around 20 per cent of Israel’s population, would come out to vote, that the parties of the anti-Netanyahu Change bloc would join forces with them, and that we would see a new government in which Arabs and Jews sat together. A government that would end Netanyahu’s rule and take Israel in a different direction. I was wrong.
Not entirely wrong. Arab citizens did come out to vote. Out of disgust with the government and its ministers, out of a desire to end discrimination, out of hope for change, and out of a genuine aspiration to take part in a government that could provide them with personal security, education, infrastructure, and a better future. Together, the Arab parties won 19 of the 120 seats in the Knesset (Israel’s parliament), an unprecedented achievement in Israel’s political history. Together with the Change bloc’s 48 seats, they created the possibility of a parliamentary majority of 67.
And what happened? Israeli society once again revealed its racist face. A hundred shades of racism. Let me describe a few of them.
100 shades of racism
There is, of course, the far-Right. There, racism is out in the open, with little effort to conceal it. But the most disturbing response to the Arab electoral achievement came from the state establishment itself.
On election morning, police raided the homes of three Bedouin Arab citizens in the Negev, over suspicions of vote-buying involving envelopes of cash. It later emerged that the searches had been conducted without warrants, and that the information leading to the arrests had come directly from the Prime Minister’s Office. The courts criticised the evidentiary basis for their detention, and within days, all those arrested were released from custody.
But who cares? The damage had already been done.
On the election day itself, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued repeated emergency appeals to his Likud voters. “They are trying to steal the elections from us,” he warned. He presented the high turnout among Arab citizens as a threat to the future of the Jewish state and warned against a government that would rely on the Arab parties. The strategy was familiar: to present the democratic participation of Arab citizens as a danger to the state. But this time, once the results became clear, allegations of criminal activity were added to the picture. Already the day after the elections, Netanyahu’s Likud party declared that “the elections in the State of Israel have been stolen,” accusing the Arab parties of bribery, electoral fraud, and other criminal activities. At that stage, the police made clear that they had no evidence to substantiate the allegations presented to them.
The accusations did not end there. A separate investigation was launched into suspicions of foreign funding intended to influence the elections, primarily from Qatar and Turkey. According to Israeli media reports, David Zini, Netanyahu-appointed head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, sought to question four Arab political leaders under caution. Yet according to those reports, no sufficient individual evidentiary basis was presented to justify questioning three of them as suspects. All this while the chairman of the Central Elections Committee, Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg, had already stated unequivocally that “the elections to the 26th Knesset were conducted properly,” that their results reflected the will of the voters, and that the suspicions provided no grounds for casting doubt on the votes of Arab citizens.
And so, while the relevant authorities continued their investigations, a very different picture had already taken shape in the public discourse. Not particular suspects, not specific actions, but an entire population whose votes were now under suspicion. In public discourse, it no longer matters very much what did or did not happen. The suspicions have already done their work. A suspicion is enough to generate a headline, a headline is enough to create a sense of threat, and from there it is only a short step to questioning the legitimacy of every Arab vote. The Arab citizen who goes to vote becomes a security threat, and the idea of “electoral terrorism” enters the language used to describe Arab political participation.
Shlomo Filber, a prominent Right-wing pollster and former close associate of Netanyahu, illustrated this in a statement that is difficult to believe was actually made. He asked his audience to imagine how 300,000 Arabs who get up one morning and head to the polling stations in large numbers could one day become 100,000 Arabs coming out with 100,000 weapons. “The motivation is the same motivation,” he explained. Israel, he argued, has learned not to focus on intentions but on capabilities, and therefore must make sure that such a possibility cannot materialise.
Think about that. The very act of voting was compared to armed mobilisation, and democratic participation and violence were presented as expressions of the same motivation. As Israeli journalist Haim Levinson put it in response, the question raised by this campaign is no longer simply whether Arabs should participate in government, but “Do Arabs have the right to exist in the State of Israel?”
And if that were not enough, Itzik Bunzel, placed 29th on Likud’s electoral list, decided to address Lucy Aharish, one of Israel’s best-known and most popular television journalists. He explained to her that, as an Arab, merely living in Israel did not make her Israeli, that Jews were the exclusive owners of the land, and that her natural path in life should have led her to wearing a hijab, having many children, and living in a shack in the Negev. He ended by declaring that she would never be Israeli and ordering her to “know your place.”
Well, fine, you might say. What else can we expect from Israel’s extreme nationalist right?
But what about the so-called “centre” parties? What about all those who have spent years fighting Netanyahu, his government, and the extreme nationalism of his political allies? And what happens in the mainstream television studios, which supposedly represent Israel’s democratic and liberal society?
Here we encounter another kind of racism. Less blatant, sometimes more polite, wrapped in terms such as “Zionism,” “the alliance of those who serve” (referring to military service), “shared values”, and “loyalty to the state.” Fine-sounding words that repeatedly place Arab citizens and their elected representatives in the dock, guilty until proven innocent. And the mainstream news media are not merely reporting this discourse. Too often, they help normalise it.
‘Bibi or Tibi?’
Again and again, the same questions are raised in Israeli television studios: Did Ahmad Tibi condemn Hamas? What did Mansour Abbas say after the 7 October massacre? Is he willing to declare that Hamas is a terrorist organisation? Does he condemn it strongly enough? Is he a Zionist? Does he recognise Israel as a Jewish state? Is he willing to say so again?
Never mind that Abbas, the leader of Ra’am, for example, has already publicly condemned the massacre, much like many others. The questions keep coming, as if nothing had ever been said. Every interview begins with another test of loyalty. As if the very fact that an Arab citizen has been elected to the Knesset and operates within Israel’s political system is not enough to recognise him as a legitimate political partner.
And then there is the question that dominates the debate: “Bibi or Tibi?” Bibi, of course, is Benjamin Netanyahu. Tibi is Ahmad Tibi, one of Israel’s longest-serving Arab members of parliament. And suddenly, the choice between two political leaders, both democratically elected to the Knesset, is presented as though it were a choice between an Israeli prime minister and a threat to the state. Again and again, the public is reminded that the Arab parties supposedly support terrorism.
Even on mainstream Channel 13, during a confrontation behind the scenes of the election broadcast, television presenter Eyal Berkovic found it appropriate to tell Lucy Aharish (remember her?), a fellow presenter on the very same channel: “Calm down. You’re not in your village here.” There it is. Racism slipping out even there.
This racism also reveals itself in seemingly minor incidents. After the election results were announced, a video circulated showing members of the Arab Joint List singing a song in Arabic. Within a short time, the song became the subject of discussions in television studios and on social media. It was claimed that they were singing the Palestinian national anthem, with its calls for arms, revenge, and the sacrifice of lives. The prime minister himself shared the video and repeated the claim. There was the proof: Arab elected representatives singing a war song. Except that the song was not the Palestinian national anthem at all. It was a version of “Biladi Biladi” (“My Homeland”), with lyrics adapted by the Palestinian poet Samih al-Qasim, which has served for decades as the unofficial anthem of Hadash, a Jewish-Arab Left-wing political alliance. And the video itself? It was filmed three days before the elections, not during the victory celebrations.
Not understanding Arabic is no excuse. In a country where around one-fifth of the citizens are Arabs, one might expect journalists and politicians to make the effort to find out what elected Arab representatives are actually singing before accusing them of calling for revenge and war. But perhaps this is precisely where something deeper becomes visible: the suspicion is already there, and all that remains is to find the evidence. And when it comes to Arabs, even a song in their own language can be enough.
These are only a few shades of racism. But the most important one, in my view, is now emerging in the question of forming a new government.
A Jewish-Arab governing coalition is not an entirely new idea. In 2021, Ra’am, led by Mansour Abbas, became the first independent Arab party to join an Israeli governing coalition, under Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid. Yet five years later, the very legitimacy of Arab participation in government is once again being questioned.
The Change bloc has 48 seats. The Arab parties have another 19. Together, that is 67 seats. A clear parliamentary majority. All 67 have recommended Gadi Eisenkot, a former Israeli army chief and leader of the largest party in the anti-Netanyahu bloc, as the next prime minister. On 8 November, President Isaac Herzog gave him the mandate to form a government. According to Israeli media reports, Ra’am is even willing to vote in favour of an Eisenkot-led government even without a signed coalition agreement. And yet, instead of seriously negotiating the formation of a Jewish-Arab government, serious discussions are taking place about the possibility of bringing in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties, known as the Haredim. Politicians who built much of their election campaigns around opposition to military-service exemptions and state funding for Haredi religious study, and who promised not to sit with Haredi parties in government, are already willing to negotiate with them. Some of these parties are not even Zionist. But with the Arab parties, which represent almost 20 per cent of Israel’s citizens, there is a problem of principle.
Also read: Netanyahu won 53 seats on anti-Arab sentiment. The real unity bloc was Arab parties
A shared fate
There is a fundamental difference between political disagreement and denying the legitimacy of a political partner. When an Arab party is repeatedly required to prove its loyalty to the state, when its support for a government is presented as a threat to Israel’s very existence, and when the votes that brought it into parliament are immediately suspected of fraud or foreign interference, this is no longer simply a disagreement over policy. It becomes a question of who is entitled to participate in government and who, even after being democratically elected, remains outside the boundaries of political legitimacy.
And here comes the real test for Israel’s political centre. After all, everyone assures us that they are not racist. They have no problem with the Arab doctor treating them in hospital, the Arab nurse, the Arab lawyer, or the hummus restaurant in Jaffa. They are happy to work with Arabs, receive services from them, sit with them in restaurants. The problem, they explain, is only with their leaders. In other words, Arabs are apparently incapable of producing worthy and legitimate political leadership.
But these leaders are their elected representatives. They are the people Arab citizens have sent to the Knesset to represent their interests, their worldviews, and their demands from the state. If their representatives are illegitimate simply because they are Arabs, then what exactly is the meaning of their right to vote? They are allowed to vote, but their votes are not allowed to influence who governs?
For four years, hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets, week after week, in demonstrations, confrontations with the police, and a prolonged public struggle to replace Netanyahu and his government. Millions of Israelis have now voted for parties promising change. And yet, at the very moment when a parliamentary majority not dependent on Netanyahu has become possible, some of the leaders of that very camp seem ready to give up the opportunity rather than rely on the Arab parties.
One meme that has gone viral in recent weeks, by Israeli musician Yahli Sobol, put it simply: “If you stop being racist, two wonderful things will happen to you. First, you will no longer be racist. Second, you will discover that you won the elections.”
But this is not only about who won the elections. Israel can no longer afford to continue like this. The exclusion of Arab citizens from government is not merely an injustice towards the Arab population. It also endangers the future of Israeli society as a whole. It strengthens the forces of extreme nationalism, makes a broad political partnership harder to build, and leaves the country trapped in the same cycles of fear, hatred, and violence.
Political partnership with the Arab parties should not be an act of goodwill on the part of the Jewish majority. These parties represent Israeli citizens who live here, work here, raise their children here, and whose future is also Israel’s future. They should not have to settle for someone graciously agreeing to look after them, nor should they have to settle for supporting, from outside, a government formed by others. They have the right to take part in shaping the future of the country in which they live, just like any other citizen.
Perhaps it is time for Israel’s centre and Left to recognise this simple fact. There is a shared fate, whether we like it or not. And it is precisely this partnership that can provide the foundation for a different future. A future of security, prosperity, and yes, peace.
Thirty-one years ago, Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated while trying to lead Israel towards peace. His government survived, thanks to the external support of the Arab parties, but he himself never brought them into his coalition. Perhaps fulfilling Rabin’s legacy today requires us not only to return to the path of peace, but also to take one step further than he himself was willing to take: to recognise the Arab parties not merely as potential supporters of a government from outside, but as a legitimate and essential part of the country’s leadership and the shaping of its future.
I stand with Standing Together, the Jewish-Arab movement whose members are taking to the streets across Israel these days, demanding a government based on Jewish-Arab partnership. They are not alone. Across Israel, Jews and Arabs are refusing to accept this exclusion and demanding a different future.
Dr. Michal Riva Erlich is an Associate Professor at the Jindal School of International Affairs and Director of the Jindal India Institute at O.P. Jindal Global University, India. Her research explores lived religion, well-being, and healing practices in contemporary India. Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)
Dear Michal, have you hears of the electoral genocide policy being followed by the ultra Sanghi (ultra Zionist) BJPeee admn in India, who have till date disenfranchised 130 million Indian Muslims, lower caste Hindus and tribals? Can your ultra Zionists beat this ultra inhuman BJPee admn?